Week 8 - Climate Change

Fig 1. Illulissat Greenland in the year 2018 credit: (Illulissat, n.d)

Greenland, Ilulissat

So guys, recently I have traveled to Greenland as part of my Europe trip and the weirdest thing happened to me. It started out as a normal day and I was touring the city of Ilulissat and blogging like any other day. The day was over and I got ready for bed. The next thing you know I woke up and everything outside was different! I asked the maid what happened and where am I and she looked at me funny. She told me that I am in the city called “Ice cap” and in the year 7018. I turned back and asked the maid “What happened to the city I was in, Ilulissat?”. She said that it went under water a long time ago. I was so shocked.  When I went outside, I saw that most of the ice sheets that I saw back in 2018 were gone. Since I am living in the center of Greenland, where it should be covered in ice sheets, that means the Earth got warmer due to something. Since the Earth has gotten a lot warmer I am betting that the evaporation and precipitation of different regions has changed, meaning the weather pattern for different regions have been modified. From what I know out of my head it is probably because of us and maybe a little bit of natural causes. Thinking back to our time I remembered reading on Greenland’s ice sheets as an important piece to the global climate system. It moderates Earth's temperature by reflecting the sun's energy back into space. Since I now know that the city I was staying in is underwater now, that means that Greenland’s ice sheets melted so much that it rose the sea level by a lot. As I’m walking around the city, I don’t see anymore gas station. I thought this was odd. I’m wondering what had happened and I remembered that we probably ran out of fossil fuels long ago and since it's been about 5,000 years, we probably are using some alternatives. I’m guessing because of all the disasters that happened because of us burning so much fossil fuel, it resulted in the ice sheets melting, leading up to many coastal cities and many lives destroyed because of sea elevation thus, resulting in countries and the human population significantly smaller now. We probably learned our lesson and found better ways to reduce carbon emissions.  Seem like we are trying to go green by using solar and wind energy. Every house I have passed, everyone has solar panels on their roofs. Also every cars around are run by electricity now. The cars has developed into solar cars that there batteries could be recharged by the sun and so no fuel is needed. Seems like we finally are taking steps to save our Earth now. Hopefully this new dawn of age, we will take care of our planet better than back in my real time.